Google forbids login with niche Linux browsers
omgubuntu.co.uk
omgubuntu.co.uk
> However, one form of phishing, known as “man in the middle” (MITM), is hard to detect when an embedded browser framework (e.g., Chromium Embedded Framework - CEF) or another automation platform is being used for authentication.... Because we can’t differentiate between a legitimate sign in and a MITM attack on these platforms, we will be blocking sign-ins from embedded browser frameworks starting in June.
(tldr have to use oauth now)
https://security.googleblog.com/2019/04/better-protection-ag...
cause Falkon and Konquerer use embedded Chromium via QtWebEngine 5.
(If it's not triggered by switching to a Firefox UA string, though, sounds like detection isn't that robust[1])
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/kde/comments/e7136e/google_bans_fal...
Start with a service open to everyone, and when you have enough market share, shut out everyone except major players. And of course, they don't give users the choice on whether they want this added security.
They could also ban everyone without their dna on file, but I don't see any evidence for a move toward that particular scenario either :)
Sounds like there's known riskier clients that have to use a different authentication band (oauth) instead. There is a line there at some point where requirements become onerous, but this doesn't seem like it to me.
Then they came for the text based browsers users but I said nothing because I wasn't a text based browser user.
Then they came for the small browsers but I said nothing because I didn't use a small browser.
When they came for me there was no one left to speak.
Googles behavior is clearly anti-competitive. At this point it is in everyone's interests for google to be broken up into multiple companies. One might even figure out a way to be good at search again.
Of course ironic changes come from Google in the name of security who doesn't care about my data security or privacy and keeps following me around the internet like a pervert. I guess you can be a peeping Tom in real life too if you claim to keep your collected photos secure from other perverts and only sell the ones with blurred out faces. What's the harm if you can't see the face?
>“Couldn’t sign you in. This browser or app may not be secure. Try using a different browser. If you’re already using a supported browser, you can refresh your screen and try again to sign in.”
A/B testing security? Is this what peak A/B looks like?
Can we go back to giving users a consistent experience and develop software based on some other type of reasoning, rather than this A/B gaslighting?
It's no different than Google's policies of restricting apps on Jailbroken phones, a practice that was ostensibly introduced for security, but quickly expanded to be used for DRM and to discourage users from taking control of their own devices.
The whole point of Open standards, the only reason we built these things in the first place, was so companies like Google couldn't decide which browsers worked with the web.
You might as well rephrase your first sentence to read, "you get a consistent experience with a current Chrome browser" -- and I have no doubt that there are people at Google who would be happy to have that policy if they thought they could get away with it.
After all, why should Google's security team trust that Mozilla's browser is secure, given that they don't get to pre-vet new versions? Even if a current version is implementing the standard correctly, there's no guarantee that a future Firefox version won't have problems. And Mozilla is already refusing to deprecate old APIs with Manifest V3, when according to Google that deprecation is super necessary to make extensions secure.
The purpose of avoiding browser monoculture was to avoid a world where a single company deploying a single closed-source browser owned the gateway to the World wide Web. The goal was never to make it easy for an arbitrary number of browsers to operate independently of each other; in fact, browsers are very complex software to get right and service providers have a responsibility to make it hard for users to get their accounts compromised even if they bring a browser with implementation errors into the loop.
I'd be more concerned if Google was blocking, say, Firefox, or if the block was harder to overcome than changing the UA. This block is inconsequential. Change the UA and be done with it.
Making it easier to build browsers is how we avoid a monoculture. If we were OK with there being 2 browser engines (Firefox and Chrome) we wouldn't need to make all of these standards. Mozilla and Google are perfectly capable of collaborating on their own in private, and it would be faster for them to do so -- its just everyone else that would be left out.
Open standards are why we can have interesting browser experiments like Beaker. It's important that there be multiple software projects pushing the web forward. Of course browsers are hard to build, just like Operating Systems are hard to build. It doesn't follow that there should only be two of them.
> Change the UA and be done with it.
To be honest, you're right on this point. This is a kind of pointless debate -- because what will actually happen here is all of the insecure browsers you're worried about are just going to take Vivaldi's route and by-default mock a different user agent for Google login screens. End users don't know or care what user agent is being sent to the remote server.
Let's be honest -- the Kmail devs are not going to throw their hands up in the air and say, "well I guess we just abandon the project now." They're going to push a change that invisibly mocks the user agent for all of their users.
Because, again, you can't trust an insecure browser. If you can't trust a browser-maker to implement the standard correctly, you also can't trust them to voluntarily go along with a scheme that will make a nontrivial portion of the web unusable for the majority of their current user-base.
It's possible a change is causing an unexpected side-effect with blocking these browsers (maybe they have a specific known browser config that has a problem and they botched the UA identifier to be too broad?)
Of course its’s not always possible, which is what economists and nutritionists and a few other sciences struggle with. But measuring security incidents and correlating them with browser use seems sensible.
There is still plenty of room for theory, such as coming up with what to test.
The web is one step away from needing to buy secure boot UEFI key like permissions for accessing it.
EDIT oh. This could also explain my constant token refresh issues with Evolution to access google calendars.
While not sacrificing security, of course.
I disagree that they are "the most secure" browsers, let alone software. They fail to isolate remote scripts properly; that people were capable of executing timing attacks against the CPU (Specter et.al.) shows that they are not really very secure.
Browsers which don't execute Javascript and advanced CSS (Lynx being one extreme example) are going to be much more secure by default.
You're focusing on attack surface. But from a security standpoint, attack surface is probably the least important factor. Every sufficiently large application has a hole in it, and all attack surface does is crudely control how likely it is to stumble across that hole. Defense in depth, by contrast, lets you keep the attacker from doing bad things such as installing ransomware on your computer just because your HTML parser had a buffer overflow.
The major browsers spend a lot of time sandboxing their scripts in separate processes, and then disabling capabilities of those processes using techniques such as pledge(1), giving them much better defense in depth. They also put a lot more effort into finding and closing security bugs through use of techniques such as fuzzing. No one questions their much larger attack surface, but they do have much more effort into ameliorating attack vulnerabilities.
I should also bring up Spectre because you did. At its core, Spectre allows you to read arbitrary memory in your current memory space, nothing more. As a result, it basically means that you can't build an effective in-process sandbox... which everyone already knew to begin with. What Spectre did was show how easy it was do such arbitrary memory reads, since you can proxy it through code as innocent as an array bounds check. There are mitigations for this, which requires rebuilding your entire application and all libraries with special mitigation flags... guess which browser is more likely to do that?
You might more coherently reduce security to "mitigation" and "prevention", but then that doesn't make much of an argument about the topic at hand.
No, it's not. Security is not a goal in itself, it can not be, security is only about guaranteeing other goals, there is no security absent all other goals. What it means for software to be insecure is that it doesn't ensure your goals are met. For many, privacy is an important goal. If the software that you are using compromises your privacy that you value, then that software is not secure.
If secure software compromises privacy in ways that concern you, it may not be the right software for you to use, but it is still secure (and potentially more secure than other software that you feel better protects your privacy).
Well, great?!
> (security)
Erm ... no?
> than to know what I'm doing (privacy)
Privacy is not about what your software knows, it's about who else gets access to that information. Software allowing access to your information to parties other than the ones that you intended is a vulnerability class commonly called "information leak".
> This doesn't mean im unconcerned about the latter.
And thus it is, as per the common understanding of the word, a security concern.
> If secure software compromises privacy in ways that concern you
That's just logical nonsense. You might as well be saying "If secure software kills you in ways that concern you, [...]".
> it may not be the right software for you to use, but it is still secure
So, let's assume your browser had a bug where for some reason, every website could read all the data in the browser. Like, could access the storage, cookies, cache, history, page contents, everything. But no write access. This is obviously purely a privacy violation ... but, according to your definition, not a security problem, right?
Yes, but not when talking about cyber-things. Generally, we only enter the realm of security of the information leak is secret or unintentional, neither of which is the case here.
Yes, precisely there.
> Generally, we only enter the realm of security of the information leak is secret or unintentional, neither of which is the case here.
So, you are telling me the user is intending the information leak? I'm not sure I understand: You say it's not a security matter if the "leak" is intentional. But then, if a user is transmitting information intentionally ... why would you call that a leak?
Or do you mean the leak is intended by Google or whoever and that is why it's not a security problem?! But then, what if a hacker intentionally installs a back door on your system and uses that to leak your information ... then that wouldn't be a security problem either, would it? Or is that where the "secret" part comes in, and it would only be a security problem if the hacker didn't tell you that they stole all your data?
Well, but do they actually have your permission?
> If it was done secretly then it would be a security problem, but without secrecy or lying, it's simply Google not living up to your privacy preferences.
Well, for one, are they not doing their things secretly? Is the mere fact that you can find out about it enough to call it "not secret"? Is the mere fact that you didn't refuse where you didn't even really have an option to refuse permission?
Let's suppose a food manufacturer put a new pudding on the market. Included with the package is a 500-page explanation of everything that you need to know about it. Somewhere on those 500 pages, all ingredients are listed. Most are mentioned using the most unusual names. Among the ingredients is a strong carcinogen. A carcinogen that doesn't contribute anything to the taste, the look, or anything else you would value. All it does is make producing the pudding cheaper to produce.
Now, a biochemist could obviously know what is going on if they were to read the 500 pages, so it's not secret that the carcinogen is in the pudding. Also, the packaging says that you agree to the conditions of use in the 500 pages if you open the package, so you gave them permission to feed you that carcinogen.
Would you agree, then, that this pudding is not a health safety risk, it's simply the manufacturer not living up to your health preferences?
Also, I don't really understand how permission can make something not a security problem. It seems like that's all backwards?! I generally would first check a product for security problems, and then give permission based on the presence or absence of security problems. And one of the security risks to check for would be software leaking information to whereever I don't want information to leak to. Why should the fact that the manufacturer of some piece of software announces or doesn't announce that they leak certain information have any relevance to whether I condier the leak a security problem? If I don't want my information in the hands of Google, then how am I any more secure against that leak just because Google told me about it?
It's not a good analogy for a whole host of other reasons, but that's one of them.
You're using a nonstandard definition of computer security. That's your prerogative, but don't be surprised if it continues to cause confusion for those you interact with.
1. Well, one thing that IT security professionals surely don't use is "cyber", that's a term from the snake oil corner of the industry.
2. People in IT security most definitely do not distinguish between security problems that the manufacturer intended as a feature and security problems that were caused any other way. You create a model of things you want to protect, and if a property of a product violates that, then that is the definition of a security problem in your overall system, obviously. The only difference would be whether you report it as a vulnerability or not, as that would obviously be pointless for intentional, publicly announced features.
> It's not a good analogy for a whole host of other reasons, but that's one of them.
Really, even that would not be a good reason, as it smells of essentialism.
> You're using a nonstandard definition of computer security. That's your prerogative, but don't be surprised if it continues to cause confusion for those you interact with.
No, I am using the exact standard definition, and the only sensible one at that. It obviously makes no sense to have a definition of "security" that says nothing about whether your system is secure. If you consider Google having access to your data a threat in your threat model, then whatever properties of your system that give Google access to your data is a security problem in your system, it's as simple as that.
The only thing that matters is whether your overall system reaches its protection goals or not, not whether some component by itself would be considered vulnerable in some abstract sense. And that obviously applies in the opposite direction as well: If you run some old software with known vulnerabilities that you can not patch, but you somehow isolate it sufficiently that those vulnerabilities can not be used by an attacker to violate your protection goals, then that system is considered secure despite the presence of vulnerabilities.
Or if you're visiting north korea then perhaps using your host's prescribed software stack may be preferable over bringing your own.
Even logging into an account from an insecure machine can be acceptable if you're using a low-value account. Some people do use throwaways regularly.
I am of the feeling that if Google's security practices require trusting an attacker not to change a user agent -- well frankly, in that case I am skeptical these changes are actually about security. Because the Google security team is smart, and I assume they wouldn't do stupid things.
But I am cautious about jumping to "this is malicious." There is certainly enough anecdotal evidence for a reasonable person to claim that Google targets competitors and tries to use changes like this to hurt them. However, it's not (currently) enough evidence for me. I am still naive enough to believe there is some semblance of good will at the company.
But I feel very comfortable saying that this is security change won't do much good, and the Google security team probably just thought, "why not turn it on?" without caring about potential consequences to competitors, because they don't think about anything outside of Google's ecosystem. I generally don't get the feeling that Google engineers are malicious, just that they're thoughtless and/or careless. I don't get the feeling that they're trying to mess up the web ecosystem, just that they act impulsively and feel very strongly that people shouldn't be questioning them; and that when people do question them, they tend to dig in their heels and become very condescending very quickly.
But again, I know there are Edge devs and Vivaldi devs that would call me naive.
Changing the UA is equivalent to "voiding the warranty," so I'm not surprised Google isn't taking extraordinary measures. At some point, if your users really want to shoot their feet, there's only but so much you can do to stop them.
You've misunderstood what I'm getting at here. It's not the user that's going to purposefully change their agent -- it's that a browser that is insecure to the point that you can't trust it to log in is also insecure to the point that you can't trust its user agent to be reported correctly.
The entire security exercise is pointless because compromised browsers lie. They don't respect user preferences. An attacker who intercepts and modifies a request isn't going to suddenly start being honest with you when you ask what browser that request came from.
To be fair, both Chrome and Firefox have outstanding bugs where they haven't yet implemented the correct specs. But there is no reason to assume that a spec-compliant browser will block Javascript from setting the User Agent for a request. It's likely to allow it, because allowing it is the correct behavior.
Even if it wasn't the correct behavior, it's silly to assume that a browser that doesn't implement XSS protection is suddenly going to get good security when it comes to implementing UA freezing in request headers. I don't think there's a world where a browser maintainer says, "it's too much work for me to respect CORS, but I really want to make sure I'm following this obscure forbidden headers list".
[0]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Glossary/Forbidden_...
"Those who give up freedom for security deserve neither."
The vision of "security" that these large companies have is to secure complete control over every aspect of your life, and the sooner the population realises that and stops believing their propaganda, the better. Google's continued destruction of the Internet through things like obfuscating URLs, purposefully degrading search results, and invasive RECAPTCHA-based surveillance is absolutely disgusting.
I'm still quite a heavy user of maps, it's hard to step away from all the convenience, but OsmAnd is already installed on my phone and I'm getting used to it too.
Ended up with a Google account still because I get value out of youtube, and of course I don't have a choice at work since most startups seem to go G-Suite by default (I'd take the MS offering over that too; they're not in the ad business).
At risk of going off topic, I hope that if one day I have children (if at all), I will remember enough of the old internet back in the late 90s/early 2000s to be able to describe just how weird and wonderful that world used to be. Not all of it was good or great but they'll be forgotten relics of an ancient era, in tech terms. You know, like getting on the internet by picking up a free AOL CD from the local supermarket; not being able to use the internet and make a phone call at the same time; cracks and keygens with the epic graphics and music; making a really bad website with frames and tables with Macromedia Dreamweaver or MS FrontPage...
Feels like these days that the internet, in the mainstream (so not HN or similar), is just an advertising and surveillance platform.
Check this tool out https://rclone.org/. It's a command-line sync tool that fully supports Google Drive.
Have you seen Windows 10 (even the Pro version)?
I still use google search and gmail in that environment, though. I use DDG for personal work, but for work work, google search is noticeably more efficient. And work requires me to use a gmail account.
A Chrome user changes her User-Agent header in Developer Tools, logs in to Gmail and finds that Google has sent her a "Security alert" e-mail message that a "new device" has logged into her account.
Maybe the e-mail should inform her that Google has stored a new device fingerprint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_fingerprint) and the ways in which Google can use it are not limited to "security". It will be used to further Google's business, online advertising services.
Sure, Google can argue these fingerprints will be used for "security purposes" and are not being gathered for online advertising services, but what are the real risks to Google of "less-than-perfect" Gmail security.
With over 60% of webmail users on Gmail how easy would it be for a user to protest Gmail insecurity by moving to a competitor, one who would not also be taking fingerprints.
> Where, surprise, surprise, it works fine without any major issues.
Sounds like it's not just a question of whether the page renders correctly?
/tinfoil hat off
Sure, anything too extreme, funny, or illegal would still be problematic. But someone’s run-of-the-mill pornhub playlist is unlikely to make much of a difference, even on the Republican side. The reputable (and influential) media wouldn’t even report it.
(I'm sure someone from Google will now argue no no it's malice not incompetence!!)
If they're worried about capabilities, test on capabilities.
Filtering on user-agent strings - which is what they seem to be doing - is the act of an incompetent, and it doesn't matter how big the company is.
Can Google not hold on to competent people any more?
It weakens their brand every time, making users either think that they're bad at building products, or hate them for trying to force them into their (stupid) ecosystem.
This is incompetent behaviour, however you slice it.
Funnily enough Google itself used to advocate against detecting UA strings (I don't know if they still do). Mind you, groups within Google don't always listen to each other.